Everybody Loves Your Money

I left a comment over at Jonathon’s MyMoneyBlog and decided it was really worthy of a post on my blog.

Since I work in IT, I’m pretty familiar with server loads and things of that nature.  Most IT architectures I’ve seen, usually count on a percentage of Users accessing the server at any one time.  In the case of web servers, that means you expect a certain number of visitors per day and you build up your infrastructure to support that.  It would be far too expensive to build your architecture to accomodate every single potential user at one time.  You can do a lot of cool things to help mitigate the risk of too much traffic.  “On demand” computing is one method.  In this case, you simply have systems standing by to help accomodate the load when it happens.  In some cases, your server hardware company might even put their equipment on your site and only charge you if you use the processing power.  That’s just one example.  There are plenty of other ways to address the risk of too much traffic too.

So, why am I blabbing about this?  I just tried to go to Emigrantdirect.com.  I, like every other Emigrant customer, received emails and a snail mail directing me to their site with a special access code to get set up on their new site.  I have to wonder if the left hand knew what the right was doing though because the site isn’t available and I’ve been reading other people’s posts saying they’ve been having trouble accessing the site too.  Apparently they have way more traffic than they can handle.  Not very comforting considering they have some of my money.

Did their marketing department tell their IT department what they were planning?  I can’t imagine that the IT department would have thought it was such a good idea to direct every single one of their customers to their website on the same day.  If my experience is any indication of how flooded they are with traffic, I’d say they probably should have sent out timed mailings that drove a certain amount of users to their new site at a time so that they could manage their traffic better.

I guess this is my way of venting in a particularly geeky way.  Come on Emigrant!  Let me see my money!!!!!

Update:  I was finally able to get on today and log in.  I like the new site much better than the old one.  I’m not a huge fan of the challenge question along with the password, but I suppose I’ll get used to it.

It wasn’t long ago that I was sitting in amazement at the price of housing in my neighborhood and I’ll admit I was a bit giddy.  Sure, I knew the party could end and kind of expected it would due to interest rates rising and other economic factors.  Well, the party appears to be over.

For the last couple years, I’ve had some saved housing searches on my browser which lets me quickly and easily see what’s for sale around my area.  Up until about 3-4 months ago, I’d most often see a “subject to inspection” statement on each listing.  That just meant that someone had put an offer on the house.  I was amazed at how quickly the houses would sell.  In many cases, it was measured in hours and not days.

Fast forward a few months to today.  I have seen the same houses sitting on the market for a couple months now.  In one case, they started the house at $419k, then dropped it to $399k and now it’s down to $379k where it’s been for weeks.  Granted, the house is smaller than mine, but only a few months ago, a house sold across the street for $440k.

I guess the party is over.  Since I’ve been so vigilant to calculate the value of my house as the prices went up, I’m also going to apply the same strict process as the houses lower or flatten out.